• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.33-44
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• 1999

This paper aims to analyze whether the phenomenon of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ is a hypercorrection or not in the North Korean dialects. Most North Koreans pronounce /i/(gold) as /kum/ because the vowel /i/ merges into the peripheral vowel space of /u/ in their dialects. The merger of back vowel is one of most distinctive characters in North Korean dialects. But some speakers pronounce /chubann/(exile) as /chiban/. This time /u/ in peripheral space moves to /i/ in central vowel space. It seems that the vowels /i/ and /u/ exchange places with each other when they uttered in North Korean. Though it was observed that the vowel movement of /i/$\rightarrow$/u/ was caused by the merger of back vowels, the reason why vowel /u/ moves in the opposite direction, that is, the central space of vowel /i/ has not been analyzed yet. This experiment starts with hypothesis that the movement of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ might be caused by hypercorrection. The first step of this research is to analyze /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ pronunciation of North Koreans. The second step is to compare the results of North Korean pronunciation with those of South Korean pronunciation and observe whether tendency of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/pronunciation can also be found in the standard Seoul dialect and other South Korean dialects.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.137-143
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• 2013

Recent investigation of acoustic correlates of Korean stop manner contrasts has reported a diachronic transition in Korean stops: young Seoul speakers are relatively more dependent on the F0 characteristics of the stops than on the VOT characteristics in aspirated and lenis stop distinction. This finding has been examined against tonal dialects of Korean and the results suggested that the speakers of tonal dialects are not sharing the transition. These results also suggested that F0 function for segmental stop classification interferes with the function for lexical tone classification in their tonal speech. The current study investigated these findings in terms of perception. Perceptual behavior of Seoul and Busan speakers of Korean was examined in a comparative manner through the measurement of perceptual cue weight of F0 and VOT in particular. The results from regression and correlation analyses revealed that Busan speakers are closer to older Seoul speakers than to younger Seoul speakers in that the cue weight for VOT and F0 were comparable in the aspirated-lenis stop distinction. This result was in contrast to the perceptual behavior of younger Seoul speakers who showed clear dominance of F0 over VOT for the same distinction. These findings provided perceptual evidence of the dual function of F0 for segmental and lexical distinctions in tonal dialects of Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.69-76
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• 2017

The current study investigated the productions of /ɨ/ and /${\Lambda}$/ in Kyungsang Korean, which is known for undergoing a dispersion for the younger generation. Specifically, to identify the nature of /ɨ/ and /${\Lambda}$/ in Kyungsang Korean, this study examined the linguistic and social factors affecting directions and degrees of the /ɨ/-/${\Lambda}$/ dispersion. Sixteen young speakers of Kyungsang Korean repeated 112 (near) minimal pairs containing the two target vowels. The formant values of each production as well as the Euclidean distance between the two vowels were analyzed for four manipulated factors: gender (male vs. female), the existence of carrier phrases (words in isolation vs. words with a carrier phrase), the lexical status of stimulus words (real-word pairs vs. nonsense-word pairs), and the vowel position within a word (word-initial positions vs. word-final positions). The results indicated that the female speakers produced the two target vowels more distinctively than the male speakers, and so did when the words were produced in isolation. The results also revealed that the Euclidean distances were greater for the real-word pairs and in word-initial positions. Overall, the results suggested that the Kyungsang Korean speakers in their 20s could distinctively produce the two vowels /ɨ/ and /${\Lambda}$/, but this vowel dispersion is not a completed process, but an ongoing one.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.93-105
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• 2000

The English schwa sound has special characteristics which are distinct from other vowels. It is non-phonemic and occurs only in an unstressed syllable. Compared with the English schwa, the Korean /e/ is a full vowel which has phonemic contrast. This paper had three aims. One was to see whether there is any relationship between English full vowels and their reduced vowel schwas. Second was to see whether there is any possible target in the English schwa sounds which are derived from different full vowels. The third was to compare the English non-phoneme vowel schwa and the Korean full vowel /e/ in terms of articulatory positions and duration. The study results showed that there is no relationship between each of the full vowels and its schwa. The schwa tended to converge into a possible target which was F1 456 and F2 1560. The Korean vowel /e/ seemed to have its distinct position speaker-individual which is different from the neutral tongue position. The evidence that the Korean /e/ is a back vowel was supported by the Seoul dialect speaker. In duration, the English schwa was much shorter than the full vowels, but there was no significant difference in length between the Korean /e/ and other Korean vowels.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.41 no.12
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• pp.229-243
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• 2003

The purpose of this study is to understand North Korean female defectors' survival strategies in China. In this research, 13 female defectors in China were interviewed. There seemed to be 6 survival strategies in the interview. They disguised themselves as if they were Chosunjok；they tried to wear fashionable clothes, to mimic Chosunjok dialect, to speak mingling Chinese words with Korean words, and to get counterfeit ID cards. They suppressed themselves from showing their angers or resentment against Chinese who looked down on them due to their illegal status, but they would seek chances to revenge on them in the future. They have survived by gelling married to Chinese, but they were reluctant to have a baby because it was not for sure what their future lives are going to be like. They were alert against people around them all the time, especially against North Korean defectors, and were conscious of their competitive relationship among themselves. Finally, some of them appeared to seek routes to immigrate to South Korea, but others who didn't yet make up their minds to immigrate to South Korea had vague anticipations of North and South Koreas to be reunified.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.7-21
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• 2004

The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.103-109
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of the Korean corpus of spontaneous speech, also called the Seoul corpus. The corpus contains the audio recording of the interview-style spontaneous speech from the 40 native speakers of Seoul Korean. The talkers are divided into four age groups; talkers in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties. Each age group has ten talkers, five males and five females. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described. The corpus containing around 220,000 phrasal words was phonemically labeled along with information on the boundaries for Korean phrasal words and utterances, which were additionally romanized. According to the test result of labeling consistency, the inter-labeler agreement on phoneme identification was 98.1% and the mean deviation on boundary placement was 9.04 msec. The corpus will be made available for free to the research community in March, 2015.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This paper investigated Korean prosody as it relates to graded internal structure in an identification function. Within Korean prosody, variants regarded as dialectal variations can appear as different prosodic scales, which contain the range of within-category variations. The current experiment was intended to show how the prosodic scale corresponding to the range of within-category differences relates to f0 contours for speakers of two Korean dialects, North Kyungsang and South Cholla. In an identification task, participants responded by selecting an item from two answer choices. The probability of choosing the correct response from the two choices was computed by a logistic regression analysis using intercepts and slopes. That is, the correct response between two choices was used to show a linear line with an s-shape presentation. In this paper, to investigate the graded internal structure of labeling, 25%, 50%, and 75% of predicted probability were assessed. Listeners from North Kyungsang showed progressive variations, whereas listeners from South Cholla revealed random patterns in the internal structure of the identification function. In this paper, the results were plotted using scatterplot graphs, applying the range of within-category variation and predicted probability obtained from the logistic regression analyses. The scatterplot graphs showed the different degree of the responses for f0 scales (i.e., variations within categories). The results demonstrate that the gradient structures of native pitch accent users become more progressive in response to f0 scales.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

The present thesis examines the correlation of VOT and F0 in the three-way distinction of Korean obstruents, conducting production and perception tests. In the production test, one female native speaker of Korean with a Seoul dialect (the author) recorded 15 repetitions of a monosyllabic word list including /ka, kha, k*a, pa, pha, p*a, ta, tha, t*a, ca, cha, c*a/ in random order, VOT and F0 of the following vowels were measured, and the result was significant for the three-way distinction with a strong correlation between VOT and F0, and also in the VOT-F0 plot, no overlapping among the domains was observed. As for the perception test, I manipulated the data recorded in the production test, heightening or lowering their F0 values. In all, 14 subjects (seven males and seven females) participated in the identification test. The result was as follows: the fortis stimuli were not influenced by F0 changes, and the VOT and F0 values at the lenis-aspirated boundary were negatively correlated. From these results I concluded the following: 1) VOT and F0 can distinguish the three domains of Korean obstruents without overlapping; 2) the fortis perception does not need F0 as its acoustic cue; and 3) VOT and F0 in the distinction between the lenis and aspirated are in the phonetic trading relation[2].

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2009

This study examines how young speakers of Seoul Korean produce tri-consonantal clusters /1kt/ and /1pt/ as in palk-ta ('to be bright') and palp-ta ('to step on'). Production data were collected from 20 speakers of Seoul Korean. The results of narrow transcription of the data showed that simplification is not obligatory as some speakers often preserve all three consonants. When simplified, there was a clear asymmetry between /1kt/ and /1pt/. Speakers showed no clear preference for either C1 preservation (C1=/1/) or C2 preservation (C2=/k/ in /1kt/ and /p/ in /1pt/) in production of /1kt/, but in production of /1pt/, strong preference was found for C1-preserved to C2-preserved variant. When compared with production data in Cho (1999), simplification patterns appear to have changed over the past 10 years, in a direction to preserve the first member of the cluster (/1/) more often, especially with /1kt/. There was no substantial between-item variation, indicating that simplification patterns are not lexically specified. Finally, the results suggest that the process of tri-consonantal simplification has not been fully phonologized in the grammar of the language as evident in substantial inter- and intra-speaker variation.